Convergence by numbers
Drowning in Numbers
Black and white impact on the environment
A recent web debate asked whether Google's home page should be black to reduce power. One calculation suggested 3,000 megawatts could be saved a year.
However, there were two flaws to this argument. First, black screens only require less power if they use Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) technology. Just a quarter of screens in use are CRT; the majority are Thin Film Transistor (TFT).
Second, the potential saving from CRT screens in use, at 750MW, is relatively trivial. The average US household consumes close to 10MW per year. Thus the saving from turning Google's homepage black would be the equivalent to a mere 80 US households, or 142 tonnes of carbon.
See full Article.
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